The scheduling conflict changed the face of the Sci-Fi franchise

When James Cameron and his producing partner Gale Ann Heard set out to make The Terminator, they faced so many setbacks that it’s a wonder the film ever got done. Cameron, who had a disastrous experience as an interim director on 1982’s Piranha 2: Birth , needed a film that would essentially launch his film career, but with a bit of directing experience, he could pull something off on his own. place to be difficult. Fortunately, he and Heard were able to raise the funds needed to film a version of Cameron’s own story about a cyborg assassin sent back in time on a murderous mission. But getting funding was just the first hurdle.

Cameron once The main role was performed by Arnold Schwarzeneggerhe had to wait for an actor to become available, which delayed production by six to eight months. Then, when he finally became available, it was revealed that the Austrian actor had signed on to film another project, leaving Cameron and company behind. film Sarah Connor actress Linda Hamilton in her solo scenes. Unfortunately, Hamilton injured her ankle, which meant she was unable to film most of her scenes, which involve a lot of running and physical activity. Meanwhile, the entire film’s budget was stretched for production, leading to a hectic and chaotic shoot that somehow paid off one of the best science fiction movies of all time.

But it turns out that those production delays actually helped The Terminator become as iconic as it has become in the years since its 1984 debut. In fact, they helped the entire Terminator franchise create a visual identity that has remained a part of the saga for all 40 years.

In 1984’s Terminator, Los Angeles created what has now become an integral part of the franchise’s iconography. From the titular cyborg’s arrival at the Griffith Park observatory to the downtown car chases, the city is crucial to the film’s overall aesthetic, not only providing a strikingly absurd contrast to the doom-filled tone of its sun-drenched suburbs, but also helping to reinforce the film’s expressionist-inspired techno -noir” with its dirty urban surroundings.

More importantly, every movie since that first installment except for the awful 2019 Terminator: Dark Fate (the film that made Schwarzenegger abandon the franchise) was founded in and around Los Angeles. In this sense, the City of Angels came to define much of the visual identity of the franchise, maintaining that strangely unsettling juxtaposition of the tropical climate of southern California and the harsh nuclear winter of the city’s future.

So it’s hard to imagine a franchise without Los Angeles at its core. But it seems that “Terminator”, and therefore the whole saga, could look very different, if not for one of those pesky scheduling conflicts and subsequent shooting delays. Talking to Movies on callGale Ann Hurd revealed that the film was not originally planned to be shot in Toronto. “The interesting thing is that we weren’t supposed to shoot in Los Angeles,” said the producer. “The original concept for the movie was that we were going to shoot in Toronto, and there were going to be some lanes of major freeway closures.”

However, before Heard and James Cameron could travel to Canada to begin filming, their star was called to the 1982 Conan the Barbarian sequel, making filming in Canada completely off-limits. Heard continued:

“Arnold had to go shoot Conan the Destroyer for (producer) Dean DeLaurentis, which meant we had to start shooting in March. You can’t shoot the streets in Toronto when there’s still ice and snow on the ground, and that’s actually why we ended up shooting in L.A. I think it was an Olympic year, so it was actually a lot more deserted than usual.”

The first Terminator movie I saw was 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day , which opens on one of the most unsettling single notes in movie history. An orchestral scene shows images of Los Angeles’ freeways clogged with cars squirming in the heat before the film cuts to a future version of the city where the freeways lie in ruins under the eternal darkness of a nuclear winter. This contrast between the two versions of the city immediately captivated me and set the tone for the entire film. As Edward Norton’s John Connor rides his bike through the unspoilt suburbs of the San Fernando Valley, you can’t forget the nightmarish future that hangs over the entire film, giving it a harrowing sense of doom, scarier than any action movie or business creature.

If The Terminator hadn’t been set in Los Angeles, it’s unlikely that any of this would have happened, robbing the saga of something substantial. In retrospect, Gail Ann Heard understood how integral the latter film was to Los Angeles, telling Ringer Movies: “There are iconic images (…) I mean the Griffith Park Observatory and the Second Street Tunnel, and downtown Los Angeles is a character in it.’ Moreover, Los Angeles has become a character in the franchise as a whole, which will hopefully get back on track now that Netflix’s Terminator: Zero proved the value of returning to the source material.

Meanwhile, it seems since the abandonment of the Terminator franchise. Arnold Schwarzenegger plans to make a new movie about Conan.